


Astraphobia

by Everythinginasockdrawer



Series: I'm Still Standing [2]
Category: Supergirl (TV 2015)
Genre: Astraphobia, Child Abuse, Childhood Trauma, Cuddly Sanvers, F/F, Homophobia, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, This Is Not A Light/Happy Fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-24
Updated: 2017-04-24
Packaged: 2018-10-23 08:09:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,272
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10715559
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Everythinginasockdrawer/pseuds/Everythinginasockdrawer
Summary: Astraphobia: An abnormal and persistent fear of thunderstorms. Sufferers experience anxiety even when they realize the risk of harm is very small.Alex knows, deep down that something is wrong. She just doesn't know what's wrong until after she finally finds her girlfriend.





	Astraphobia

**Author's Note:**

> So this happened... Honestly I'm really feeling the whole Maggie-Needs-Love-And-Support thing at the moment. Cause I love her and it's like... Someone do something.
> 
> Anyways since there's gonna be a lack of Sanvers tomorrow I figured now's a good time to pump out a fic. So here you go! Hope you enjoy?

Alex tries not to freak out. Alex tries and Alex fails miserably. But Maggie hasn’t text her once all day and there’s a freak storm outside with winds strong enough to move parked cars and rain falling so fast you can hardly see ten yards in front of you and the severe lightning has already knocked out power to over half of the city after striking at one of National City’s two largest power plants. So the fact that her girlfriend hasn’t returned any of her text messages even when her sister (who’s out in the thick of things preventing accidents wherever possible) has managed a few messages periodically throughout the day does worry her. 

It’s three o’clock when J’onn finally tells her to go home,  _ “There’s no point in you being here, we can’t do much of anything until the storm lets up”  _ and it’s three ten when she makes Winn track down Maggie’s phone so she can find her girlfriend,  _ “I’m pretty sure this is illegal… And that she’ll murder me…”  _ and it’s three fifteen when she hops in her truck (cause there’s no way she’s gonna try to ride her motorcycle in this weather) and makes her way towards her girlfriend’s apartment complex. 

Alex mulls over the knowledge of her girlfriend’s location in her head, if she’s at home, she should have been able to answer right? And by the time she managed to park in the parking garage (which took twice the usual time due to the storm) she’s managed to work herself up into a panic over the possible reasons Maggie hasn’t been able to text her; most of them ending with serious injury or death. 

So when Alex unlocked the door to Maggie’s apartment with the key the older woman has given her a couple of weeks ago for just this reason and doesn't find the kitchen or living room out of order she lets out a soft sigh of relief and makes her way towards her girlfriend’s bedroom. 

The door is hanging wide open and upon reaching it Alex looked inside and found the detective buried under a mountain of pillows and blankets in the center of her tiny bed. (Admittedly it was actually a normal sized bed, Alex was just comparing it to the mammoth that was her own (very comfortable) bed.) Alex carefully picked her way over to the bed and gently slid in next to her girlfriend, carefully resting a hand on top of the pile of blankets that hid her from view. 

“Hey, Mags. You okay in there?” She asked gently, still not completely sure what was going on and not wanting to frighten the other woman. The pile of blankets under her hand shifted in what she thought was a jerky nod. “You wanna cuddle for a little bit?” She asked, her voice still gentle as she rubbed the spot she was pretty sure Maggie’s head was. There was another jerky nod and suddenly the blanket next to her lifted up as Maggie raised an arm so she’d have room to move under it with her.

Alex quickly chucked her shoes off and stripped down to her bra and underwear before diving under the blankets with Maggie. She quickly gathered the smaller woman in her arms, tucking her head under her chin and tangling their legs together. No sooner had she settled into her spot when suddenly another streak of lightning flashed in the window, the resulting thunder shaking the building to its core. She wouldn’t have thought much of it if it weren’t for the fact that Maggie jumped at the sound and immediately curled deeper into her arms, clutching at the front of her shirt with a quiet whimper. 

“You sure you’re okay?” She whispers into her hair and immediately she feels the body against her tense up, even as Maggie nods her head slightly and she might have let it drop if it weren't for the fact that another bolt of lightning and equivalent roaring thunder left Maggie once again clutching tightly to Alex’s body. “Sweetie, look I know something’s wrong, and I’m not going to try to make you tell me what’s going on. But it’s okay if the storm’s freaking you out, okay? I’m not going to think any less of you just because you’re upset, okay? I’m going to lay here and hold you and you can cry or scream or talk, whatever you need to right now, alright babygirl?” 

They lay there for several hours, Maggie clinging tightly to Alex as the storm roared around them. It wasn’t until well into the night that the storm finally began be let up, eventually the thunder and lightning fizzling out and the rain pouring less harshly against the windows. Maggie’s whole body is tense, practically a statue frozen in Alex’s arms and when she finally started to speak it was so quiet that Alex barely realized she had begun saying something.

“It… It was a night like this that I was outed.”  _ Oh… Shit…  _ Is the only thing that comes to Alex’s mind. “It was raining like the whole Earth was gonna flood and the lighting struck and shook the ground for miles in all directions and the winds whipped through the countryside with a vengeance.” Alex readjusted them so Maggie was lying partly on top of her but she didn’t stop speaking. “And I remember getting home and it was storming so bad, I just wanted to get upstairs and change out of my soaking clothes into my pajamas and snuggle up in bed with a book and stay warm. I didn’t manage to get more than a couple of steps into the house before the screaming started. He’d been drinking and when I got inside, he just started shouting, all these terrible things… About how I couldn’t be gay, how he wouldn’t have a kid like that… He broke my arm you know? Took a hot frying pan filled with boiling oil and slammed it straight into my arm, left the whole left side of my body with severe burns… And he… It doesn’t matter really…” Maggie took a shaky breath and Alex pulled her closer, planting a gentle kiss on her forehead. 

“But it was storming so badly that night and he threw me out afterwards, with nothing but the burnt and torn clothing on my back and a small backpack, my body beaten to the point I could barely walk… I… I didn’t know what to do I just… I ended up out in the woods, curled up on the ground in this abandoned field… I could barely move because of my injuries and I was so scared… I ended up just laying there for almost two full weeks, I have some food in my backpack but it didn’t help much… Not when it would start to snow so on top of having severe burns and a broken arm among… Other things… I was freezing to death… You know… When my aunt found me she barely recognized me… But she rushed me to the hospital and the doctors managed to save my life… Barely… They said if she’d found me much later they wouldn’t have been able to do anything…” Alex felt as tears began to fall against her skin and she held the other woman even closer to her body as she shivered violently at the memories.

“Hey… It’s okay, I’ve got you. It’s okay.” And she didn’t mean it in the “ _ I’m here so you’re life is perfect now so you shouldn’t be crying about shit that happened in your past” _ kind of way. She meant it in the “ _ it’s okay to let yourself feel this because I’m going to be here to hold the pieces together until you can do it again yourself”  _  kind of way. Which she did as Maggie stumbled through the rest of what she had to say.

“And… And ever since then I… I get these… Terrible panic attacks during storms cause all… All I can remember is… Is what  _ he  _ did to me and… And… And I hate it cause I can’t seem to get over it and it’s… It’s so  _ stupid  _ cause it happened so long ago… But… But I can’t seem to... Hold it together and… I just…” Maggie had begun to hyperventilate and Alex quickly moved them so they were sitting up, Maggie resting in between Alex’s legs, her back pressed against Alex’s front and the redhead quickly tried to calm down her panicking girlfriend. 

“It’s okay Baby, it’s okay. Just breathe… That’s right Sweetie, just breath into my hand, that’s right… I’ve got you, there you go… Good girl… That’s right, just breath Babe…” Alex gently rocked them back and forth as she talked Maggie through breathing properly again. 

“I’m sorry.” She mumbled, completely exhausted in Alex’s arms as she finally managed to catch her breath, trying to put some space between them as her face heated with embarrassment.

“Hey… None of that… Okay? You don’t need to apologize to me for having negative reactions to your childhood trauma… Okay? You having feelings is completely valid and more than okay. You are allowed to be hurt or upset or angry. You’re allowed to want to curl in a ball and cry for hours because what he did was  _ terrible _ … The way he hurt you is inexcusable and  _ you are allowed to have feelings about it _ . I don’t care if it happened fifteen years ago or fifty, it still hurt you  _ a lot  _ and if you can never completely be at peace with what happened  _ that’s okay, you don’t have to be _ . You don’t have to  _ get over it _ or pretend that it didn’t hurt you. Okay? Now come back here and let me cuddle you.” 

Maggie quickly melted back into Alex’s arms as several more tears fell, unbidden, from her eyes and she buried her face in the crook of Alex’s neck as the taller woman fell back on the bed and pulled her in closer, her fingers gently running through the other woman’s hair.

“You know… The judge in town wouldn’t even try him… The police dismissed the case as a case of teenage rebellion and everyone made a point to make my life miserable… We didn’t even last three months before my aunt caught some boys from school trying to sneak into the house to  _ straighten me out _ . She moved us to Gotham the next day and never once turned back… You know that’s why I wanted to be a cop? I wanted to make sure that no kid ever had to go through that again…” Alex pressed a kiss against her temple and ran her free hand up and down her spine.

“You, Margaret Ellen Sawyer, are too good for this world.” Maggie sniffled and absent-mindedly tangled her legs with Alex’s.

“Dear god, don’t call me that… It’s like elementary school all over again.” Alex snorted.

“Elementary school not your thing, Sawyer?” Maggie let out a watery chuckle.

“You could say that… I was a small, nerdy girl with glasses and a buzzcut… You do the math.” Alex winced good-naturedly at the description. 

“Well if I’d known you back then I’m sure I’d have thought you were awesome.” Maggie shook her head with a soft smirk on her face.

“I think you’re underestimating how bad it was… Like… I had no hair…” Alex chuckled slightly.

“Well unlike most seven year olds I wasn’t a judgmental asshole at that age, so I think you’d have been good. Besides, it’s not like  _ I  _ had a lot of friends at that age either.” Maggie lifted her head up so Alex could see when she raised an eyebrow at her.

“Is that so?”

“I’ll have you know I was a total nerd and was already taking over the high school science club’s labs to run tests by that point in time. So no, I was far from popular in elementary school.” Maggie chuckled, a real one for the first time since Alex arrived, and laid her head back on Alex’s shoulder.

“Of course you were, Danvers. Of course you were…”

_ ~Sanvers~ _

“Hey, Winn. I need you to look someone up for me.” Alex nonchalantly tossed a piece of paper on the table in front of the young tech genius and stood casually against his desk. Winn side eyed her before taking the paper and looking at it, his eyebrows scrunching up in confusion at the name.

“Who’s Timothy Sawyer? Is he related to Maggie? What…” Alex cut him off.

“It doesn’t matter, just look him up.” Winn let out a soft sigh of protest before finally just turning to his computer and typing some stuff into his search engine. In a matter of seconds everything about the man was displayed on the screen in front of her. Alex bit her lip and barely held back a snarl at the sight of the man’s picture.

“What do you want me to do? Erase his digital footprint? Frame his for something?” Winn seemed to have picked up on her disdain for the man, but Alex shook her head.

“No… Just put an alert on him… I want to know ahead of time if he decides to come anywhere near National City.” Winn wisely decided to keep his mouth and simply set up the alert like she asked.

“Anything else I can help you with?” Alex shook her head, aiming one last glare at the screen before turning around and marching off towards her lab.

“No, that’ll be all for now Agent Schott.”

**Author's Note:**

> So I totally have ideas for more ways to add on to this, which is why I let it end the way I did... I can have another chapter with some more details about what happened when Maggie was kicked out (I sorta alluded to it but I could totally write another fic where Alex finds out that part.) And I also could have a chapter where he shows up and Maggie has to deal with seeing him (I really want to have an overprotective Kara freak out when she realizes that he hurt Maggie and have her go off on him.) And I have a post-engagement fic that ties in where they're trying to pick out a last name that's mostly fluff... Anyways maybe if people are interested I'll write more in this universe. In the meantime...
> 
> I hope you have a good (insert time of day) and I'll see ya'll later.


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